On Lear, and Loving People When They’re Worms
Lear does not want to be loved just the correct amount, according to his bond. Fuck that! says Lear, and Worm Girl
I went to see King Lear recently. I saw the Kenneth Branagh production, and it was decidedly mid, as the Guardian promised it would be and as the Economist, bafflingly, did not understand. (My urban middle-class political leanings confirmed, I guess.) The visual theme was “Stonehenge,” and it added nothing. There were a lot of fairly silly pieces of fake violence with large sticks. The acting was okay, but just that, really. There were no particularly cool directional choices.
Nevertheless, it’s Lear, and it got me thinking about the need for proportionate love.
Spoilers up front: In case you haven’t seen it: Lear is about a British king who is retiring (apparently they used to do that). He asks his daughters how much they love him as preparation to grant them huge tracts of land. Two assure him they love him more than anything, more than anyone else, more than life itself, more than any child ever loved their father, and so on. One tells him she loves him just the correct amount. The latter daughter is promptly and furiously disowned. The two remaining (previously effusive) daughters are increasingly cruel to him despite their prior protestations of love. This and age cause him to unravel: Lear slowly loses his mind, kept company by his witty fool who keeps it real with him along the way. As with so many tragedies, eventually basically everyone dies, with a lot of winding subplots about treason, war, sibling infighting, mental illness, aging, dementia and general heartbreak.
Part of the reason I’m merely glossing over the plot here is that most Shakespeare plots are (let’s be honest) just kinda bad. Downright silly, even.
“What if faeries are real, and fuck with us, possibly literally?” is not exactly genius level material.
![Picture of Titania and Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream Picture of Titania and Bottom from Midsummer Night's Dream](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa0dc3ff3-980b-42fd-88b5-484abc822604_1600x1030.png)
“What if there are lots of identical twins?” is even sillier, somehow.
![Picture of twins from A Comedy of Errors Picture of twins from A Comedy of Errors](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F4e14c72f-db8c-4675-bfcf-7213bdc2419a_850x1199.png)
The plots are not generally why we like Shakespeare, those of us who are fans. Also he lifted most of them from other people. But that’s ok; he was the blockbuster writer of his time with a striking poetic tongue, and blockbuster movies are not exactly known for their genius plots either.
Despite the silliness of most Shakespeare plots I want to suggest that there is something interesting about this one. It struck me only recently. Shakespeare has that quality for me; each time I return to it, I find something new. I’ve always been especially interested in the idea that people understand Lear in particularly differently in each decade of life, and never really get it with this particular play until they're old.
In line with this, in recent years (maybe it’s to do with my age!) I've noticed the actual plot of Lear, specifically the beginning, where Cordelia refuses to flatter her father by declaring her love for him in elaborate terms. She’s about to be married off to one of three men also in the room, and she tells Lear she loves him:
According to my bond; no more nor less…
You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me; I
Return those duties back as are right fit,
Obey you, love you, and most honour you.
Why have my sisters husbands, if they say
They love you all? Haply, when I shall wed,
That lord whose hand must take my plight shall carry
Half my love with him, half my care and duty.
Sure I shall never marry like my sisters,
To love my father all.
She loves Lear, but she won’t pretend he’s her everything. There are other people to consider. There is the necessity of proportion.
To swerve without embarrassment to a pop culture reference, it reminds me of a recurring viral meme where someone (a woman, usually) asks “would you still love me if I was a worm?”
This is my favourite variant for some reason:
It’s the worst kind of cringe to explain why jokes are funny, so I’ll only say: the meme is funny in part, at least, because there are people, a lot of people, who ask questions a bit like this. It’s funny for the reason all humour is funny, even when we don’t realise it: because it contains a kernel of recognisable pain. Indeed, I'll be honest: I was, once, at least in my younger years (I’m terribly mature now, of course), worm girl. Will you love me no matter what? Will you love me for sure, forever? These alone are difficult promises, especially if by “love” we mean “be in a committed romantic relationship with” rather than “care about and support the autonomy of.”
The worm question, of course, takes it one step further and sillier. “Will you love me in a counterfactual situation where I have no brain and four hearts?” The woman asking the question has run up against the bald absurdity of the need she feels. For her partner to say yes would be preposterous, but for him to say no is somehow unacceptable.
So it is with Lear. Lear does not want to be loved just the correct amount, according to his bond.
Fuck that! says Lear, and Worm Girl.
He does not, especially, want to be told that love is relational, contingent, measured, thoughtful. He wants it to be over the top, extra, all-consuming. He will only be reassured by this.
The reason it's difficult for him to accept proportional love, I’d suggest, is that the idea of proportional love, however objectively reasonable, messes with one’s sense of meaning and security. And this, in turn, is not “natural” but cultural, at least in large part. It has to do with the romanticisation of love, in all its forms. The Shakespearean tale is about the romanticisation of the parent-child relationship, which might have been stronger back then, when families lived in an intergenerational (and of course patriarchal) setup. In contrast, today, at least for miserable urban elite Guardian-reader types like myself, the most romanticised form of love is “romantic” love itself, the sexual pair-bond.
In both cases, though, I notice when we romanticise love we stretch it, distort it, blur it. It becomes culturally acceptable, suddenly, to do all kinds of things that aren’t otherwise tolerated: to become fickle, demanding, cruel and forgiving of cruelty, blind, obsessional. We shrug, laugh, roll our eyes where we’d otherwise be alarmed. We love out of proportion to time, to our other commitments. There are also the usual paradoxes which occur whenever a clever sort of ideology is involved: “love” in a romantic sense is assumed to be natural, even though it also needs to be jealousy guarded and constantly testified to and performed via great feats. And so on.
Perhaps one reason that I am noticing this bit of Lear, this message about proportional love and our inability to tolerate it, is because I’m a woman in my 30s who spends far too much time on Instagram. And as a result, I see this strange warping of expectations around romantic love all the time. My “explore” feed regularly looks like this:
These are not materials that reflect reasonable or helpful expectations, many of them anyhow. They do not pass what my friend C and I call “the friend test”; we would think them unkind or unreasonable to expect or demand of a friend. We only excuse them as a culture because we have romanticised sexual/couple love so intensely. Romanticising means idealising, certainly, but notice how much bitterness and cruelty end up involved as well. That’s the disappointment.
My suggestion is that romanticisation is one of our psychological responses, “solutions” of a sort, to disappointment; we often romanticise what we can’t otherwise bear and certainly can’t fix, what can’t possibly live up to what we want from it. It is a form of cruel optimism, to cite Lauren Berlant. And we can’t get what we want from romantic love because too much is placed on it. In an increasingly unequal, precarious world, where few can meet their dreams through work or politics or the use of free time, where we are more socially isolated than before, where many fewer people hold religious hopes, meeting one’s soulmate and building a life with them is the theoretically achievable and expected miracle salvation for all. It is considered an accomplishment, the main route to intimacy, and a salve for myriad psychological wounds. Our culture offers romantic love as the remaining messianic vision, the one thing that will go right and then our lives will have their meaning and purpose and real life will really start.
But of course (most already know what I’ll say here) the reality of romantic relationships is much messier, even if they go well. We get bored. They chew loudly and tell us too much about their favourite sport. They lose interest in sex. We lose interest in sex. We crush on others. We fall into destructive cycles of attachment. We get straight-up disappointed. And even if none of that happens, we argue over the dishwasher. They do not fix us, we do not change them. Real life continues as much as it did before we met them. Even the very best real love can’t live up to the place that the couple-form holds in the popular imaginary. We’re set up to find it disappointing. And strangely, that means that many of us demand more from it and not less, perhaps as a way of continuing to insist that the fantasy must be realisable rather than relinquish hope and have to find a new source of meaning.
Love me if I’m difficult, we say, love me if I act out, love me more than is proportional to any role another human can in one’s life. Love me to tell me I have meaning and purpose. Love me to fill the fantasy that is keeping me going. And love me if I’m a worm.
Shakespeare is not impressed by this coping mechanism, this deflection from pain. When it comes to fantasies about love, he concludes:
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.
Why tear down the dream of all-consuming love? We should, despite the fear and discomfort, I think, so that we can expect more kindly of our partners and ourselves, distribute our love in less self-destructive ways, ask for it more thoughtfully, and prioritise platonic relationships too. It probably also is worth noticing the close relationship between the expectations in romantic love and those of parental love (Freud smirks at this thought; and note parents still “give away” their children at their weddings). Today, I suspect, the romance of parental love most commonly shows up not as a demand on children of powerful patriarchal fathers, but on the average mother, of whom so much is asked and to whom so little is provided. You should die for your kids, if need be, is the common message about maternal love. And certainly give up your life, in the meantime. Romance is, in that area too, working to cover the inevitable pain of how difficult things really are.
In short, it matters that we peel back the romanticisation of love, the need to be loved even if we are worms, because only once we stop romanticising love can we be let down, find other sources of meaning, and also begin the serious difficult task of loving honestly and more fairly.
The upside of this difficult work is that people who are proportionate with their love are also those who know what’s really due. They are not trying to win approval when they give us the love they have. They are not there to get something from us, consciously or unconsciously. They are willing to let us down, but they are willing to do this so that they can also, when they mean it, show us what they feel. So it is with Lear’s daughters. Cordelia is wise because she is willing to disappoint, measured and principled. Her sisters are, without this, treacherous. Also: which of us, really, would want a partner who would spend their life prioritizing a worm?
As a last thought, though, maybe we could still love people when they’re worms, of the human kind I mean: when we’re soft and squishy and dumb, dumb enough to cry on a plane, dumb enough to be insecure. (Let’s love them proportionally, that is!) And we should sympathise with our fellow worms and worm-girls. Lear is a bad man, foolish, furious, vain, nasty to his children, domineering to his servants, and yet. We weep with him. He wants, (and many of us long for) an impossible security about the thing that matters most. We won’t get it, not through romanticism, not through demanding it, not through power, not through a display of weakness, not through cunning, not through over-generosity, not through withholding, not through simply believing in it, and certainly not through reading posts on Instagram. It comes according to our bond, proportional to many other loves, through patient relating and serendipitous luck, with the ever-present threat of loss. Poor Lear. Poor us! It’s enough to drive one mad.